Prof. Gil Ribak is an Associate Professor at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Israel, Professor Ribak came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held several academic positions, such as the director of the Institute on Israeli-American Jewish Relations at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. His book, Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2012. Prof. Ribak has published numerous articles in journals such as, AJS Review, American Jewish History, East European Jewish Affairs, Israel Studies Forum, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern Judaism, and Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, among others, as well as many book chapters, of which most recently is “’Cleanliness Like That of the Germans’: Eastern European Jews’ Views of Germans and the Dynamics of Migration and Disillusionment”, in Steven J. Gold (ed.), Wandering Jews: Global Jewish Migration.
Currently he is completing a book-length manuscript about the representation of Black people in popular Yiddish culture. In 2021-2022, Gil served as the European Union's Marie S. Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, and in the fall of 2022, he was on a fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
